In response to the recent election, #ADPhD is sharing reflections, short takes, and responses from scholars of slavery. To submit yours, click here.

On November 18, 2016, in light of the recent election, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, associate professor of history at Indiana University-Bloomington offered this reminder on Facebook of what standing up against injustice has meant, across time and place.

I’ve often heard people say that if they’d been alive during slavery, they would have been abolitionists.Continue reading →

In response to the recent election, #ADPhD is sharing reflections, short takes, and responses from scholars of slavery. To submit yours, click here.

On November 11, 2016, in light of the recent election, the BackStory podcast rebroadcast its episode on emigration and immigration, which included stories on free blacks who sailed to Liberia during the 19th century:

“With Donald Trump vowing to keep undocumented Mexicans out of the U.S. with a wall and Hillary Clinton promising the same immigrants a path to citizenship, immigration was a big issue in the 2016 presidential election. But what about the flip side – emigration?

“In this episode of BackStory, we ask who’s chosen to leave the U.S. and what parts of their American identities they took with them – from the Loyalists who fled to Canada in the wake of the American Revolution, and the free blacks who sailed to Liberia in search of true freedom, to the Depression-era refugees who moved to the Soviet Union.”

“In a direct election system, the North would have outnumbered the South (which had a large population but far fewer eligible voters), whose roughly 550,000 enslaved black people were disenfranchised. Delegates from the South generally supported Madison’s idea of the Electoral College over a direct election system because it was based solely on population volume, not citizenship status or enfranchisement. In conjunction, and at Madison’s urging, the convention agreed to count each enslaved black person as three-fifths of a citizen for the purpose of calculating each state’s representation in the Electoral College and in the allotment of congressional seats.”